Andrew Coyne will be leading our budget coverage in the next edition. He felt more strongly about the budget than I did, as you will already have noticed. My own column will be kind of wistful. I do want to make a few points, not necessarily connected, in the meantime.

• Last spring I wrote a column arguing, tongue in cheek, that Liberals and Conservatives were already running a coalition government. Andrew wrote a column more recently, suggesting more seriously that they give such a thing a try. This budget is clearly designed to form the basis for a Conservative-Liberal coalition de facto. It’s surprising, though I suppose it shouldn’t be, how little attempt the Conservatives make to placate the Bloc or the NDP. In the latter case especially, that’s obviously a big change. The cozy little arrangement by which Jack Layton and Stephen Harper paid to Martin Liberalism, and which lasted well after the 2006 election, is over. This is the price Layton pays, perhaps gladly, for turning the NDP caucus into a machine for voting No to the Conservatives. But it points up an interesting feature of the political landscape since the last election and, at least, until the next: the Liberals are going to govern in coalition with somebody. It can be the Conservatives or it can be the NDP with Bloc support. But the Conservatives can’t govern alone and they can’t govern durably with the other opposition parties. And the NDP-Bloc can’t govern alone or with the Conservatives. That leaves the Liberals, and only them, with the freedom and the obligation to choose. Continue…